NSA hides spying programs in hard drives made by top PC manufacturers

San Francisco

THE US National Security Agency (NSA) has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.

That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyber-espionage operations.

Kaspersky said that it found personal computers (PCs) in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said. The firm declined to publicly name the country behind the spying campaign, but said that it was closely linked to Stuxnet, the NSA-led cyberweapo…